Learning to Perceive the American Soul
by Joel A. Wendt
this essay was first published in the Evolving News for
Members
of the Anthroposophical Society in America, in the Summer of 2010
Rudolf Steiner had much to say
in the course of his life concerning the division of the world into
Eastern and Western cultures (Orient and Occident) on the one hand, and
Eastern, Central, and Western soul characteristics on the other. It is
important to distinguish the cultural manifestations from the soul
characteristics. In this article I am only going to reflect briefly,
and, I hope, deeply, on the particular soul characteristics of
Americans; I urge readers of Steiner to seek to appreciate a certain
subtlety involved when he spoke about East and West from these
different points of view—in the one case about spiritual
culture and in the
other about the general
characteristics of the soul. One way to help see this is to conceive of spiritual
culture as related to the history
of ideas, and
another is to see that matters of the character of the soul involve the
evolution of consciousness.
There are many possible
approaches to perceiving the American soul, one of which is reading
books and pamphlets. These could include (but not be limited to) Carl
Stegmann’s The Other America: The Western World in the Light of
Spiritual Science;
Dietrich V. Asten’s America’s
Way: The Tasks Ahead;
and F. W. Zeylmans van Emmichoven’s America and
Americanism. These
materials are, by the way, the work of European-born individuals whose
interest and curiosity about America and Americans can be very useful.
At the same time we need to note that these authors did not possess an
American soul, so those soul phenomena that can only be understood
through objective and scientific introspective self-knowledge will have
escaped their vision.
Another way to perceive the
American soul is to look at American spiritual culture, past, present,
and future, for such culture can be a kind of mirror of soul
characteristics. Certainly, for example, the Transcendentalists are
worth a good look, and we can ask a significant question by wondering
whether and in what way Transcendentalism is similar to or different
from Romanticism and/or German Idealism. Obviously, we can look also to
Rudolf Steiner as part of this past.
For example, Steiner said in The
Challenge of the Times
that English speakers live instinctively in the sphere of the
consciousness soul in their life of rights. He also said, in lectures
to the workmen on 3 March 1923, that Americans come to anthroposophy
naturally, while Central Europeans come to anthroposophy spiritually.
An ongoing meditative contemplation of the concepts in these sentences
can bear much fruit.
As someone inspired by three
years spent with Carl Stegmann and the Emerson study group in the early
1980s in Fair Oaks, California, I will try to bring forward as the
heart of this essay a few of the more essential results of my own
thirty years’ spiritual research on the American soul.
My principle discovery was to
come to understand that in the “Western,” both in film, television, and
novel forms, there existed a deep, nearly mythic, representation of the
American soul (sometimes in American Studies classes this is called the
“American character”). One could go into this in great detail, but here
I only have space for a kind of sketch. Please keep in mind that in
looking at American film, television, and novels we are looking at
spiritual culture (various forms of expression in the history of ideas)
and finding mirrored in these artistic expressions deep aspects of the
American soul.
For those not familiar with
American culture, let me recall some facts. The Western was a popular
type of film right from the beginning of the silent movies in the
1920s. From television’s arrival in the 1950s, the Western was a
principle dramatic form that prevailed for decades. Western novels are
less well known, but those who want to do further research may want to
look closely at the works of Zane Gray. Some academics consider the
hard-boiled detectives of film noir to be a translation of some of the
antiheroic characteristics of the better Westerns into a more modern
social environment.
Let’s consider for a moment the
basic plot structure of the Western (and somewhat, of the detective
story). First there is in the community the presence of evil. This evil
evokes fear, and thus paralyzed, the community is unable to act. Then
enters the lone stranger, who at sometimes great personal cost makes
individual sacrifices that result in the removal (or taming) of evil.
Often the community will not be grateful for this service, and the lone
stranger (if he survives) might be rejected by the community. There
are, of course, many variations on this basic theme.
The best modern practitioner of
the art of the Western in film is the actor, writer, and director Clint
Eastwood. While many sensitive souls will be repelled by the violence
of the Western, we need to remember that those individuals who are
willing to face down evil in any community do so at grave personal
risk. Eastwood’s work is well regarded by his peers, and his
penultimate expression of the Western, the film Unforgiven, won many awards.
In the beginning the Western was
simple in its use of archetypes, with the good guy wearing a white hat
and the bad guy wearing a black hat. In Unforgiven the real moral ambiguity of the
consciousness-soul age is fully present, for in this film there are
clearly no good guys or bad guys. Eastwood in Unforgiven plays a down-and-out former
murderer who is hired by some prostitutes to kill a cowboy who
viciously cut the face of one of their friends while he was drunk.
This archetype of the cowboy is
so subtly prevalent in American society that we often miss its broader
appearance and implications. For example, the elder former-president
Bush instinctively moved to Texas in 1948 to step away from the reality
of his father’s family ties to a wealthy New England elite; he also
moved in order to clothe his own young family in the myths of Texas
manhood. One can find, among political historians of America,
insightful considerations of the importance of this struggle between
the Yankees and the cowboys (the Northeast vs. the Southwest). John F.
Kennedy was a Yankee and his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, was a
cowboy. The cowboy is, of course, more in line with the true myth of
the American character (soul) in the guise of the common
man of the West,
while the Yankee is more in line with the elites of banking—what some
call the merchant princes—who are historically the inheritors of many of the
former powers of the once-dominant aristocracies of blood.
There are many other films that
could be discussed, such as High Noon starring Gary Cooper (who was
born in Helena, Montana, making him not only a natural common man of
the West but an ideal personality for many of the films of Frank Capra,
such as Meet John Doe). Clint Eastwood also made the remarkable film Pale Rider, in which, in response to the
prayer of a young adolescent girl, a dead man (Eastwood) comes to town
dressed as a preacher in order to confront the evil there (Revelation
6:8: “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on
him was Death...”).
Now hidden behind this somewhat
mythic picture of the lone stranger and the problem of evil in the
community is something more general in the American soul that can be
described in this way: The American uses thinking to solve a problem
perceived as social. If we understand that thinking is a spiritual
activity and that ideas are crucial spiritual aspects of human
existence, this use of thinking by Americans is not only important to
perceive, but we also need to understand how the West is different in
its thinking gesture (soul characteristics) from the center and from
the East. Here we have stepped away from the mirroring aspect of
American spiritual culture and entered directly into the real realm of
soul processes that can be observed through scientific and objective
introspection.
As anthroposophists in America
we are more familiar with the thinking gesture of the center, which is
not necessarily something good for Americans to imitate and practice.
In the center, the thinking gesture stands between what is earthly and
what is heavenly so that human beings of the center, in their social
practices, want to incarnate the ideal. Their thinking takes hold of
the ideal and seeks to bring it into incarnation. As a phenomenon in
the Anthroposophical Society and movement we see this in habitual and
semiconscious approaches to Rudolf Steiner’s conceptions of a threefold
social order. The social world is to be molded into the shape of this
remarkable ideal.
When Americans try to do this we
mostly fail, in large part because it is an unnatural gesture in the
realm of thinking, although rooted in understandable imitation of our
European brothers and sisters (remember, Americans are natural anthroposophists). Just as
represented in the American myth, the Western, the American soul seeks
to solve the problems it perceives in the social realm and the thinking
gesture then seeks to grasp those ideas that “solve the problem” (thus
our tendency to pragmatism). First comes the experience of the social
dilemma and then the gesture of thinking that seeks to heal it. Deeply
introspective self-observation will confirm this, as well as serious
Goetheanistic examination of the phenomena of American life and culture.
Americans, then, do not try to
conform social life to any ideal as do Europeans, but rather try to
heal the social realm of its defects, and our natural gesture of
thinking serves this need. We are first oriented toward what is
earthly, and we reach up to the heavenly only as needed. We can
understand this from social phenomena if we carefully recall the
founding of the United States, which was prompted by multiple social
problems connected to the evils the colonists perceived in the
overreaching of the English aristocracy. In response to this we have
Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1775);
then the Declaration of Independence (1776), which led to war with
England; and then finally the U.S. Constitution (1787). All of these
were pragmatic attempts to solve certain social problems; in no way
were they attempts to first conceive an ideal and then bring it to
incarnation.
There is a very real question
lurking in the background here that has to do with how the threefolding
idea instinctively (English speakers instinctively inhabit the realm of
the consciousness soul in the life of rights) and naturally (Americans
are natural anthroposophists) arises in American political culture. As
this is a very large theme, I can only give a couple of hints.
Some years ago (1991) I wrote a
brief summary of certain beginning results of my social/spiritual
research titled: “Threshold Problems in Thinking the Threefold Social
Order.” In that short work I observed that similarly to cultural life,
which has three aspects: science, art, and religion;—and similarly to
economic life, which has latent within it (although yet to be fully
expressed) a threefolding: producers, distributors, and consumers;—the
rights life in the course of Western civilization came to comprise
three aspects: the state, media, and the people. This made media, in
its most comprehensive sense, the heart of the social organism (see
also my 1995 essay: “Waking the Sleeping Giant: the Mission of
Anthroposophy in America”).
Media presently consists of an
old fourth-cultural-age aspect that is still dominated by top-down,
pyramidal, hierarchical third-cultural-age structures such as huge
media corporations and the new media (Western civilization is dying
into a new becoming) with its morally free (instinctive and natural
ethical-individualistic) tendencies (e.g., the Internet) to create a
functioning media anarchy. As a result, Americans’ creative impulses
have invented, for example, social networks (MySpace, Twitter, and
Facebook, etc.) and free, creative media such as YouTube. These are the
social growing point of a new, free media configuration and will turn
out to be the best place for anthroposophy to become socially
accessible in the future.
We need to visualize media in
this sense as a dynamic, living social process within the total social
organism. Recognizing the social necessity and inherent problems of
media is a phenomenological and inventive approach to social
threefolding rather than an ideological one that seeks to conform
social relations to a preconceived ideal. It is within free media that
new impulses (seeds) connected to the rights life will find their most
vital social growth medium (soil).
It is also here in the heart of
the rights life (free media) that the means to truly heal the social
dysfunction currently manifesting in the world’s economic crisis will
be found. If we understand threefolding in a living way we come to
realize that the center (the rights life) is an amalgam or synthesis of
the cultural and economic spheres. These social spheres are not
separate from each other but interpenetrate in a living way such that
free media bears within it the best of the cultural (free spiritual
life) and economic (brotherhood and sisterhood impulses) realms in a
kind of unitary combination or synthesis (see Steiner’s Inner
Aspects of the Social Question for certain important indications).
Another way to examine the
difference between the “center” and the true West (America) would be to
compare the archetypes of Goethe’s Faust with the archetypes of the
Western. The American is not a Central European in his fundamental soul
characteristics, and Faust, as an example of mature
spiritual culture in its representation of consciousness soul
questions, is inapplicable to the same consciousness soul questions
faced by the more youthful American soul and spiritual culture.
Understanding this difference
between the American soul and the Central European soul will also help
us to appreciate today’s split in American Waldorf education between
the idealists who want pure, “ideal” Waldorf schools and the
pragmatists who foster charter schools in order to make Waldorf
education more universally available—seeing modern weakness in
education as a social problem to be solved rather
than as a situation demanding the incarnation of an ideal.
Now to round out our examination
it would help to add the picture of this same thinking gesture as it
tends to arise in the East (again, in the sense of soul characteristics
and not spiritual-cultural tendencies). Whereas the West perceives what
is earthly and seeks to solve its dilemmas, and the center perceives
the ideal and seeks to bring it to incarnation—to build an artistic
bridge from the ideal to the incarnate real, the East seems to want to
remain united with the remembered ideal and leave behind entirely what
is earthly.
Elaborating such a theme,
however, might be going too far, because we are less familiar with both
the phenomena and general spiritual history of the East than we are of
these same facts for both the Center and the West. Thus my comments on
the East here are brief, and are to be taken with a grain of salt in
the absence of something far longer and more sophisticated.
So we have a powerful ahrimanic
tendency in the West (a rich and vital materialism, with its obvious
attendant dangers, including Ahriman’s incarnation, that seeks to bind
the ego to the sense world); a presently imprisoned Christ-oriented
tendency in the center (the higher elements of the German spirit, for
example, have been held at bay by the appearance on the social plane of
the Beast from the Abyss within National Socialism following Steiner’s
death); and an ancient and powerful luciferic tendency in the East for
merging the soul with a now rigid, overly ideal order that would then
strongly inhibit the earthly freedom of the ego (the spirit), witness a
continued presence of remnants of the caste system in modern India.
Rudolf Steiner has challenged us
to understand this and to find a way that these differentiated soul
gestures might work together. Each by itself is one-sided.
Through our conscious coworking via international conferences on these
very themes, we may discover the means by which the anthroposophical
movement might offer true healing to the social world of humanity in a
more integrated fashion. For example, far less urgency for idealistic
Waldorf schools, and more support for local adaptations of the basic
themes. For Americans, the path to this work begins with increased
self-understanding and the perception of our own soul characteristics
as distinct from those of the center and the East.
Without a deeper knowledge of
our own soul and how it is differentiated from the other soul gestures
in the threefold world of West, center, and East, anthroposophy in
America will suffer. Already there has been in the society and movement
here in America an excess of interest in European culture at the
expense of coming to know American culture. Granted, European culture
contains the heights to which Western civilization has risen, but this
is of the past. The West, particularly America, is of the future.
Here is the English
anthroposophist Terry Boardman, in the 1999 book The Future
Is Now: Anthroposophy at the New Millennium, reflecting on Steiner’s
thoughts: “In his lectures to the West-East Congress in Vienna 1922,
Rudolf Steiner spoke of Europe-Asia as ‘the problem’ of modern times
and Europe-America as ‘the solution’. By this he meant that Europeans
were preserving the dessicated remnants of an ancient Asian
spirituality in the dusty abstractions of their intellectual,
political, and religious systems. The future lay rather with the will
to create out of nothing. And this willingness he saw in the youthful
energies of the Americans.”
A first step in consciously
manifesting this potential to perceive the American soul depends upon
Americans taking up not only the introspective study of their own souls
but also a deep and appreciative encounter with their own, albeit
youthful, culture. The practice of anthroposophy, as we all should
know, is about self-knowledge. We can, as an aid to our inquiries
concerning the American soul, adapt something Steiner has said in a
more universal context: We learn the most about ourselves (our American
character) by studying that which is outside us (in this case American
culture), and the most about what is outside us (American culture) by
studying ourselves (our personal version of the American character).
That we also bear more universal soul characteristics should not be
forgotten, but if we want to learn to better perceive the American soul
the above orientation will be a great help.
From personal experience let me
add one final thought. It is crucial to love any object of thought if
we are to draw near to its true idea-essence. If we harbor antipathies
to American culture—if, for example, we judge it as wanting in
comparison with European culture—we will by that presumption disable
our capacity to know, through love, the genuine and youthful creative
heart of American culture. And, unfortunately, we will also miss coming
to know something quite profound in ourselves as Americans.
Joel Wendt
is the author of several books which can be read for free at his blog
“Shapes in the Fire". William Bento’s review of American Anthroposophy, the latest
book, precedes this essay.